The first weekend I was back from Swarthmore, I went to my coffeeshop. It was full, so I took my coffee to the table with the cutest guy at it. He was exactly my type – tall, with dark hair – and was wearing a cute vintage plaid shirt. I asked to sit down, and he accepted. We sat in silence, doing our own thing for a while. And then he found some excuse to talk to me.

I should add here that I have never gotten more dates than when I was certifiably crazy. I was so, so nuts and unstable at the time. But men were swarming all over me.

Anyway, this guy and I hit it off. He was an architect, so we decided to go for a walk because I knew of some classic DC Wardman houses in the neighborhood. Then we tried to find a car wash that we could drive through (unsuccessfully). Overall, we had a ton of fun, and it was a pretty adorable date.

We agreed to get together the next week. I met him in his neighborhood, and we went out for sushi. As soon as we sat down, he told me that he had spent a year or two in Japan. He then proceeded to talk incessantly about Japan until our food came. Then, when I picked up my chopsticks, he told me that I was holding them wrong. I told him that, as long as I could pick up my food, I was holding them right enough for me.

The dinner was extremely unpleasant. But apparently I was too masochistic at the time to end the date there.

He asked me to come back to his apartment, and I agreed. Why? I don’t know. I cannot answer that. I definitely wasn’t digging him or expecting to ever go out with him again. We spent some time naked, and it was terrible, and then I finally escaped and went home.

When I started writing this, I remembered that he emailed me a few times after that. I thought that I probably told him off at some point, but I just checked my email to see if I had any emails saved between us. I did. Our entire correspondence, in fact. And we still had some emails between us eight months after that date. To my horror, they suggest that I tried to cheat on my boyfriend at the time with this guy several times. That’s so depressing.

But the emails from him are really hilarious.

One reads, simply:

“For me the pursuit of love is like chasing after a round cheese that’s rolling down a mountain.”

And at one point he got really, really mad at me when I tried to call things off. My email was actually really sad, citing all my mental health issues as reasons why I couldn’t date him. Here was his passive-aggressive crazy response to one of my sad emails trying to end things, telling him I was thinking about how this was a bad idea and I wasn’t just coldly blowing him off. I’m not sure if it makes sense without the context of the other emails, but here it is:

“So, [this is] your apologetic version of “piss off”, and this whole song has been one long dismissal. You haven’t “been thinking” about this. This was obvious in the car ride as we halfheartedly hinted at little plans we both knew would never happen. I ain’t mad at ya.”

I actually remember being really hurt at this. That he was making me into the bad guy. Oh, 19 year old me was so sad.

Apparently he got over it, though, because that email was in October, and the emails continued through June.

The last email chain between us began with him inviting me to a movie. I reminded him that I had since gotten a boyfriend. His last email to me read:

“‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I should be going. Best of luck.’

The end”

Surprisingly, I never saw him again. He found a new coffee shop. I stopped trying to cheat on my boyfriend (at least with him). It really was the end.